CentOS ceases to be supported but RHEL is offered for free

Last month, Red Hat caused a great deal of concern in the Linux world when it announced the discontinuation of CentOS Linux.

The long tradition - and the ambiguity in Red Hat's terms - led users to believe that CentOS 8 would be available by 2029, just like the RHEL 8 on which it was based. The shutdown of CentOS 8 in 2021 cut eight of those ten years, leaving thousands of users blocked.

CentOS Stream

Red Hat's announcement on CentOS Stream in December - which it initially identified as a "replacement" for CentOS Linux - confused many users on its role in the updated Red Hat ecosystem. This week, Red Hat makes the following clarifications:

To sum up: make CentOS Stream the collaboration center for RHEL, with the landscape looking like this:

• Fedora Linux is the place for great innovations, thoughts and ideas for the new operating system.
• CentOS Stream is the continuously delivered platform that becomes the next minor release of RHEL.
• RHEL is the intelligent operating system for production workloads, used in almost every industry in the world.

Although CentOS Stream could be considered suitable for "home-labers", the lack of a well-defined life cycle made it inappropriate for the most productive use and, in particular, the use of production from stores that have chosen a RHEL compatible distribution from the beginning.

From February 1, 2021, Red Hat will make RHEL available at no cost for small production workloads - with "small" defined as 16 systems or less. This access at RHEL free of charge is done through the Red Hat Developer Subscription program and comes without restrictions.

Red Hat is also expanding the availability of developer subscriptions to groups as well as to individual users. Going forward, RHEL registered clients can add entire groups of developers to the developer subscription program at no cost. This allows the whole team to uses Red Hat Cloud Access for simplified development and maintenance of RHEL in well-known cloud providers, such as AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Source of information: arstechnica.com